It won’t detect the device if not root, even with chmod 777 /dev/ugen0* (which I know is a very bad idea). This is annoying when I forget to change the ownership of the resulting scanned image back to me.

I saw that -current has a saned rc.d(8) script, so I ran “/etc/rc.d/saned start” in hopes of it Just Working, but got the same results—no device detection with scanimage(1) without root. The saned man page seemed to mostly be about network configuration, and I’m running locally.

Does anyone run sane without needing root? If so, how?

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Many thanks to the forum regulars who put time and effort into helping others solve their problems.

Of course On this computer I have locally attached Epson Perfection 1670.
The scanner uses uscanner driver (or at least it used to since from this dmesg I see ugen attached). Uscanner is I think removed from 4.9 anyway and form most scanner one had to disable manually from the generic kernel. My scanner uses snapscan sane-backends and requires firmware which you have to extract withcabextract from Windows driver. The firmware needs to be uploaded in /usr/local/share/sane/snapscan/your-firmwarefile.bin. Now the things that you are really interested in: